Rant #3,156: A Little Bit of Soap

I went grocery shopping yesterday morning, and yes, the prices are horridly high, and based on these prices, I cannot understand why the government doesn’t just give in, admit that we are in a recession, and move on from there.

So anyway. I am shopping around, using a list prepared by my wife, getting items that we need and mentally checking off one item after another on the list.

I got to the cereal aisle, and my wife listed “Fiber One” as the cereal that she wanted.

I looked around, and they did not have it, so I texted my wife, “No Fiber One.”

She wanted wheat germ, but they did not have it, so I texted her, “No germ.”

My wife wanted decaffeinated coffee, and the shelves did not have any decaf at all. I texted my wife, “No decaf.”

She got back to me and texted, “What else are they not going to have?”

I texted back to her with what I thought was a clever response, “No soap, radio.”

She texted back to me, “What does that mean?”

After thinking about it a little bit, I texted back to her, “Oh, I guess it is an old ‘Rochdale’ thing, forget about it.”

(When I use the term “Rochdale” here, it does refer back to my old neighborhood in Queens, where we used different phrases and expressions that I think were unique to where we lived … a “Rochdale thing,” thus, refers to one of those phrases and expressions, but read on.)

When I grew up in the aforementioned Rochdale Village in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were lots of expressions and catchphrases that we used that might have been unique to the community, or at least we thought they were.

You have to understand this community at the time, which was a mix of black and white, Jew and non-Jew, Hebrew and Yiddish and ghetto slang and all of that mixed into one … so yes, there was going to be a unique set of expressions that were entirely germane to this neighborhood, or at least that is what I thought.

I know that one was “sike,” which basically meant “gotcha,” when we exposed somebody’s ineptitude in one ways or another.

We would not just say “sike,” but we would put our finger under our eye and push the skin down when we said this.

To this day, I have no idea why.

Another “gotcha” thing was “No Soap, Radio,” but even though I might have thought that this was a unique phrase to Rochdale, it really wasn’t.

Here is how it went:

Two elephants were sitting in a bathtub together.

One said, "Pass the soap."

The other replied, "No soap, radio!"

That is the all-time sucker joke, used to see if you are paying attention.

It isn't funny, was never meant to be funny, and quite frankly, it makes no sense.

But that is the point of the whole thing.

This “joke” began in New York City in the 1950s, and somehow as a kid in Rochdale, it got to us, and we used it to make sure that someone we were talking to was paying attention to what we were saying.

The way it is supposed to be played out is between three people: the joke teller, an unassuming person, and someone who is in on the hoax of a joke.

You tell the joke, your accomplice laughs his or her head off on it even though it is not funny, and the third unwitting person just sits there, not getting the joke—since there isn’t one—and finally, since he thinks they missed something, this unwitting soul begins to laugh too, because they feel they will look foolish if they don’t.

But there isn’t anything to really laugh about, so it makes the unwitting person look foolish when he finds out that he has been duped.

Sike!

There is actually an entire Wikipedia entry on this “joke” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_soap_radio) that goes into all the social, psychological and other ramifications of pulling off this scheme, offering sides to this thing that I never knew existed.

Kind of strange, but I never knew that this “joke” had such implications.

I know that my friends and I used this joke to make others look silly, to demonstrate that they were not paying attention to what we were saying, and for no other reasons.

One person I knew who fell for this joke constantly was a guy named Bradley, who was duped so constantly by this joke that I wonder if he ever listened to anyone but himself.

Sorry, Bradley, for making you the pawn so many times using this “joke” on you.

I hope I did not harm you for life by using it on you so many times.

As for my wife, I guess “No Soap, Radio” never got to the Rockaways where she grew up way back when.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

But please, do pass the soap!